Donald Trump’s proposed moratorium on Muslim immigration certainly isn’t a unique idea. Dr. Mudar Zahran, a Muslim refugee living in Europe, warned in an interview last October that Muslim migrants should be kept out of Europe. Nor is it close to the most extreme idea recently voiced; that title belongs to a Samoan proposal to ban Islam itself. And now it’s clear that it’s also a mainstream idea in the United States, with polls showing that Americans have come to favor a temporary ban on Muslim immigration.

While Trump’s proposal has long been a winner with GOP primary voters, it initially was greeted with skepticism by the general electorate. For example, three days after Trump announced it, “the Wall Street Journal released a poll that found 57 percent of Americans objected to the proposed Muslim ban. Just 25 percent of those polled supported Trump’s plan at the time,” reports the Daily Caller. Yet while different polls have painted somewhat different pictures, one thing is clear: As time has worn on and Americans have heard news of one jihadist attack after another, support for the immigration moratorium has steadily increased. As the DC further relates:

Reuters has kept a rolling poll on the subject since May. On May 31, Reuters found that 54.5 percent of Americans disagreed with the Muslim ban and 40.7 percent supported it.

By June 6, the same poll found that 52 percent of Americans supported the ban, while 44 percent opposed it.

The Reuters poll has remained steady after the Orlando terror attack. On June 14, fifty percent of likely voters supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, while 42 percent opposed it.

This is significant because Reuters is a liberal news organization that, if anything, would use methodology underestimating support for the ban.

This public-opinion evolution is no surprise given the recent high-profile Muslim terrorist attacks in Orlando, Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere, whose combined death toll numbers in the hundreds. Yet the reality is that every day brings a new battery of jihad-oriented headlines. Consider a sampling from just today at Jihad Watch: “Sweden: Muslim screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ smashes up Malmo church,” “Italy: Saint’s statue defaced with ‘Allah akbar,’” and “Ramadan in Lebanon: Muslims hit Christian village with multiple jihad suicide attacks.” Then there are the “no-go zones” that exist in many European cities; these are Muslim enclaves in which civil law has broken down, Sharia dictates often take precedence and authorities may fear to tread.

Facts such as these make people sympathetic to Trump’s simple message that Muslim immigration should be halted until we “can figure out what is going on.” And the reality is that our “elites” have no idea what’s going on. Newsmax just reported that one million Muslim immigrants have been brought to the United States during Obama’s presidency, and it’s now predicted that Islam will overtake Judaism in the future to become America’s largest non-Christian religion. Moreover, Breitbartreports that the “Obama administration has created a ‘resettlement surge center’ which has produced a pouring of 100 Syrian refugees in the U.S. per day.” And while officials such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson (himself a Muslim) have claimed the vetting process for these migrants is “extraordinarily thorough and comprehensive,” this rings hollow. As Breitbart also now tells us, “The ‘vetting’ process, already questioned by leaders in the country, has been fast-tracked from 18-24 months to just three months. The ‘refugee mill’ can now go through thousands of applications every month.”

Yet the reality is even worse — as there simply is no way to reliably vet these migrants. In fact, intelligence officials, the Greek government, and a New York City Syrian community leader named Aarafat “Ralph” Succar have all said as much. Why is it impossible? Because nations such as Syria simply don’t possess comprehensive Western-like databases containing accurate information on all their citizens. Moreover, it wouldn’t matter if they did. As Succar pointed out last year, you can bribe a public official in Syria and get official government documents stating you’re whoever you want to be. As he put it to the New York Post at the time, “When they tell you that [the refugees] are vetted, are you out of your mind?”

And according to the aforementioned Dr. Zahran — a leader of the Jordanian Opposition Coalition — that’s precisely what we’re out of. Calling the current migrations “the soft Islamic conquest of the West” and warning that naïve Westerners are being manipulated, he explained in his 2015 interview that the “refugees” are not as they appear. He said that many of the Muslim migrants are only claiming to be Syrian to get refugee status, and as for the rest, “Seventy-five percent of those arriving from Syria come from safe area[s]; actually, the ones in disaster areas cannot … leave.… Most of those people arriving ... in fact do not need the protection; they arrive from Turkey, they arrive from Jordan, they arrive from other places which are safe.”

And this raises the question: Can America be safe with our free-association immigration policies? While Dr. Zahran’s 2015 statements were made in reference to the European Muslim-migrant issue, they should be relevant for our nation as well. As to this, he also said that in his opinion, half the Syrian male migrants “have actually held weapons and fought in the Syrian war.” Reinforcing this point, Succar told The Post “that ISIS terrorists have ‘absolutely’ sneaked into America by posing as civil-war refugees — and joined sleeper cells just waiting to be activated. ‘I believe the terrorists from Syria have been coming into the United States, not only in the past few years, but way before that…. I think they’re already at work."

Meanwhile, our officials are at work facilitating death by immigration. Consider the refugee ruse: Refugee status is meant to be temporary. A person is granted safe haven and then is repatriated once the danger is his native land has passed. But with “resettlement” the stated goal, it’s clear Obama is using gratuitous granting of refugee status as another end-run around the immigration laws. And why? A clue: 70 to 90 percent of our new immigrants vote Democrat upon being naturalized.

In addition, refugees should be accommodated as close to their native lands as possible. Regarding this, why have rich Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Dubai not accepted these co-religionist migrants? Why are they sent thousands of miles farther away to the West? Perhaps the Muslim nations know something we don’t, and part of what they know was related by Zahran. Said he, “You read Arab magazines and Arab newspapers; they are talking about, ‘Good job! Now we’re going to conquest [sic] Europe.’ So it’s not even a secret.” And is the United States next?

While conquest takes some doing, the fact is this: If one-tenth of one percent of the one million Obama-era Muslim immigrants are terrorists or will become so, this amounts to 1,000 violent jihadists. It took two to wreak the havoc in San Bernardino — and only one to create the carnage in Orlando. And this is why the common sense of Trump’s idea is becoming increasingly common.

Photo of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo: Mike Sharp

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